New Nuclear Power

Albert Owen Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

I agree with every word said by the hon. Members for Hove (Mike Weatherley) and for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood). We are in an extraordinary situation in relation to our nuclear policy, charging ahead to a certain financial train crash. Huge sums will be spent and Parliament is to be kept in ignorance of the details of what is going on. That must be changed. We have heard the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee say that her Committee has no responsibility until the contract has been signed. By then, it will be too late and we will have committed ourselves to a period of probably 30 years at least to pay an enormous cost to a company that is not British, that is in France and that is already subsidised. It is crazy.

We have seen the stampede of all the companies—E.ON, RWE and now Centrica—away from investing in nuclear power, and for very good reason: it is a financial basket case. I will not repeat the figures relating to the two new nuclear stations, in Finland and at Flamanville. They are the future, but one is four years late, and the other is six years late; one is €3 billion over budget, and the other is €5 billion over budget.

[Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend and I will never agree on nuclear power, but to set the record straight, there are nuclear power stations that were built on time and on budget in Taiwan and many other places by Hitachi with Japanese technology. My hon. Friend identifies one technology in one country.

[Paul Flynn]

My hon. Friend, like my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), has a point of view. They have nuclear power stations and nuclear jobs in their constituencies, and naturally they have to fight for their constituents. One can understand the distortions of view that inevitably result from that.

The history of nuclear power has been a story of false dawns all my life. I can remember as a schoolboy going to an exhibition in Cardiff called “Atoms for Peace”. I remember ZETA, a fusion reactor that was going to produce electricity that was too cheap to warrant a meter. We had the steam-generating heavy water reactor, one of the worst civil investment decisions since the building of the pyramids—huge investment that produced nothing of value. Margaret Thatcher had plans to build 10 nuclear power stations, but only one was actually built. My party was seduced by the pied piper of nuclear power fairly recently.

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[Paul Flynn]

I cannot do so any more because I have run out of injury time.

My constituency, like that of several other Members on the English side of the Bristol channel, is washed by an enormous cliff of water that travels up and down the estuary twice a day. There is immense power there that is unused and wasted. This can be tackled, but not by a barrage, which has so many difficulties and objections that it would be impractical. It is not necessary to build a brick wall across a tidal flow to get energy from it. Water wheels work very simply: the water flows and they tap the energy. The best way in which we could get that energy cheaply and cleanly is through a series of small machines in the water to tap the energy that could then be linked with a pump storage scheme, possibly in the valleys of south Wales. That would provide demand-responsive energy—base load energy—that was entirely predictable and did not alter like wind or any other sources. It would be available, clean, British—

[Albert Owen]

It is expensive.

[Paul Flynn]

My hon. Friend says that it is expensive, but it is very cheap. He should take a trip to La Rance in Brittany, where for more than 30 years there has been a tidal power station producing the cheapest electricity in France.

Thanks to the Public Accounts Committee, we now have a clear picture of the future. Let us look at the enormity of the sums involved. Professor Tom Burke, who was an adviser to a previous Government, has said:

“The scale of the proposed investment is very large. The contract will last for a very long time at a strike price of £100/MW and a 30 year contract like this would require a subsidy of £1 billion/year above today’s wholesale price for electricity. This would lead to a transfer of £30 billion to EDF”—

Électricité de France, a French company—from the pockets of British taxpayers. He continued:

“Should the whole of the 16GW of new nuclear anticipated by the Energy Minister be financed on similar terms it would cost householders and businesses £150 billion by 2050.”

Back in 2008, I tabled an early-day motion forecasting that any profits that might be made from nuclear power would be enjoyed by foreign companies. We have seen the stampede that is now going on with E.ON, RWE and Centrica, and that is all for business reasons. Any profits would be enjoyed in France, but the enormous cost would be paid by British taxpayers.

There are huge liabilities involved. We hear about £67.5 billion—an astonishing figure—for dealing with nuclear waste. The Flowers committee report said in 1976 that it was irresponsible to go on generating electricity from nuclear power without a solution to the waste problem.

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[David Mowat]

My honest answer is that I do not know if they are more efficient. I assume that they are—why would they not be?

I am of the view that we should not go nuclear if there are low-carbon technologies that can outperform it at scale and within the time frames that we need, because I accept that there are issues with nuclear. For example, we have not solved the waste problem. The question for the House, though, is whether that problem is more severe than global warming. We must make choices. We need to decide whether the waste issue is containable—no pun intended—whereas the global warming issue is not containable. However, it is nonsense to pretend that nuclear is not part of the decarbonisation of the world.

[Albert Owen]

The hon. Gentleman is making a sensible and powerful argument. On waste, the House needs to recognise that we are talking predominantly about legacy waste that successive Governments have not dealt with but needs dealing with now. That waste comes not only from civil nuclear but from the defence industry and the health sector. On the other hand, we will be some 50 years into the future before anything of that kind comes out of a new-build nuclear power station.

[David Mowat]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the issue of legacy waste is not relevant to this discussion, but neither is it a great advert for the nuclear industry. It is true that much of the waste that is causing the difficulties in Cumbria is military and health waste, rather than waste from nuclear power stations. However, it is also true that the old stations were not designed with the disposal of waste in mind and we are paying the price of that.

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[Mr Davey]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady and am glad that her train arrived. I will deal with the issue of subsidy later.

I urge the hon. Lady and, indeed, all colleagues to consider that the environmental case for new nuclear has got stronger in the past decade or more. I am one of those from the green movement who have been prepared to recognise the low carbon benefits of nuclear generation, which remain even when life-cycle analysis of carbon for a new nuclear station is taken into account. I believe that nuclear, alongside ambitious energy efficiency, renewables and carbon abatement, can play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Nuclear’s cost-effectiveness has to be seen in the context of climate change and decarbonising our power sector. It is right that this House asks the tough questions on the affordability, value for money and cost-effectiveness of nuclear power, for those questions are at the heart of this Government’s policy on nuclear power.

Before I turn to the key issue of the cost of nuclear and of subsidies, let me briefly address recent issues affecting nuclear policy and this debate. The first is GDF—the geological disposal facility for nuclear waste—and what will happen after the recent vote in Cumbria. It was the priority of the previous Government, as it is of this Government, to ensure the safe management of nuclear waste. Britain has a huge legacy of nuclear material to store and dispose of, whether or not we build a single new nuclear reactor. As we develop our new nuclear build programme, it is right that we press ahead with tackling that legacy. I believe that geological disposal is the right policy for the long-term safe and secure management of higher-activity radioactive waste.

Indeed, what happened in Cumbria convinced me even more so, for both Copeland and Allerdale councils voted to participate in the next phase of the work to identify potential sites for geological disposal. The communities that were most likely to host the facility wanted it. However, the Government agreed that Cumbria county council also needed to vote in favour in order to proceed to the next stage, but it did not, which is disappointing. However, the invitation for communities to come forward remains open.

This is a long-term programme, looking at the next century and beyond, to site and build a geological disposal facility. The views in Copeland and Allerdale make me confident that the programme will ultimately be successful. Last week’s decision does not undermine the prospects for new nuclear power stations, but it does require us to redouble efforts to find a safe, secure and permanent site for disposal.

[Albert Owen]

The Secretary of State is right to say that we need to deal with the legacy waste now. In fact, we should have done so generations ago. Does he also agree that all parties in this House have a responsibility to contribute to that debate, including the Green party, which I know has concerns about it? Much of this waste is not civil nuclear; as I said in an earlier intervention, defence and health projects contribute to some of it. We need to dispose of it safely and quickly.

[Mr Davey]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that past Governments failed to tackle this legacy. The previous Government put in place a framework, which we are continuing, and it is right that we now grasp this legacy, because it shamelessly has not been grasped in the past.